“Sweet Thames, run softly”: Spenser’s Prothalamion

Abstract

"The Fire Sermon" opens with a river lined by trees that have lost their leaves—an ordinary occurrence, but one that is first understood as damage and then described as if it were a person giving up the ghost: "The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf / Clutch and sink into the wet bank" (WL 173–74). The speaker then moves from a sense of disrepair and death to one of abandonment, as "The wind / Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed" (WL 174–75). What comes next is a line from a sixteenth-century betrothal poem by Edmund Spenser.KeywordsSexual ViolenceWaste LandCigarette ButtRiver LandscapeAnimated NatureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.